What's Happening?

Following our triumphant Maine premiere of Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2, we troup back to the Farnsworth with Artists on Stage. First is a series of short dramatic readings by playwright Don Nigro. The plays will include: Picasso, a monologue by Georges Braque about an argument he and Picasso had about finding a squirrel in one of his paintings; Dutch Interiors, a monologue by Vermeer about finding the Girl with a Pearl Earring in a tiny perspective box he has become obsessed with; The Daughters of Edward D. Boit, featuring the four girls in the painting of that name by John Singer Sargent; and Europe after the Rain, a WWII-era interrogation of artist Max Ernst by two FBI agents. These readings will be presented on January 12.

This is followed by a dramatic reading of the long-running, off-Broadway, absurdist comedy by actor Steve Martin, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, also at the Farnsworth Art Museum. The play places Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, a barman, a model, a waitress, an art dealer, a countess and a charlatan in a Parisian cafe in 1904, just before Einstein transformed physics with his theory of relativity and Picasso set the art world afire with cubism. In this, his first comedy for the stage, Martin plays fast and loose with fact, fame, and fortune as the characters argue and muse on the century’s achievements and prospects, sex, art, coffee and Elvis, with infectious dizziness. This reading will be presented on February 9.